Autobiography of a Hunter uses the life story of a werewolf-hunter to probe the human depths of Nietzche's abyss. It is less a werewolf story than a novel of psychological horror. Despite plenty of crunchy transformations and blood-spattered combat, the novel is primarily concerned with the protagonist's transformation into a beast, himself. Not the normal werewolf kind of beast – the novel avoids the hunter-is-bitten cliche – but the human kind, who sacrifices kindness and conscience on the altar of efficiency. Sylvester Logan James lost his mother at birth and is raised by an emotionally unavailable father who teaches him to turn fear into hatred. When James is 14, a werewolf attacks him in the Canadian forest, killing his father. With no family left, James is taken in by his father's friend, an elderly Cheyenne trapper, Michael Winterfox. Winterfox was once a Beast hunter, and James' hatred for the creature that killed his father sets him along the same path. Winterfox begins the boy's training in the tradition of the Reydosnin warrior, teaching him how to stalk, fight, and ignore pain. The one thing Winterfox cannot teach young Sylvester, however, is the last, spiritual, path of the warrior. Disgusted by his inability to make contact with the spirit world, James finally decides to leave Canada to enlist in the Vietnam War. "The Beast will kill you one piece at a time, Sylvester. Bite by bite," warns Michael Winterfox before he begins James' training. And so it does. When the Autumn Moon is Bright follows James' mental and emotional transformation as he fights in the war, goes into business as a tracker, gets married and has a son, loses both, and finally ends up in prison after gunning through a roomful of werewolves. When James is finally pulled out of prison, he's less than he once was. "About the only thing I've managed to salvage of my life is honor and my sanity," he tells the officials who give him his conditional release, but as the book progresses we see him stripped of even those last two scraps of dignity. Bit by bit all that makes him human is sacrificed to the hunt, until we see him killing bystanders and torturing informants in his obsessive quest to destroy the Beasts. In the end, the question is whether his humanity can be redeemed and, if so, at what price. The novel spans approximately 35 years of Logan's life, during which he travels from Canada to the United States and from Vietnam to the Soviet Union, and encounters Native American lore, Satanic rituals, a Ku Klux Klan attack and New Orleans voodoo ceremonies. The author, Brian Easton, writes about these disparate places and events with the confident detail of somebody who has done his research. Easton is a newcomer to fiction publishing ... Yet he writes with a thoughtful maturity that is refreshing – and unusual – in a small-press first novel. The story's pacing is good and the twin storylines of James' hunt for the Beasts and his personal transformation are well-balanced. The novel exhibits an occasional hardboiled turn of phrase that's a pleasure to read, and its details and descriptions ring true. Here and there the reader will still detect flashes of the amateur -- in the overuse of exclamation points during combat scenes, in the cliche of familial death as motivation, and in the sometimes awkward handling of female characters in seduction scenes (e.g., "'It'll come back to you,' she mewed.") -- but this handful of nitpicks in a 388-page novel can be easily dismissed. Overall, beneath its werewolf-story mask (it is) a well-crafted study of the human soul.